


(Please Don’t) Hesitate

by fiveyaaas



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Heavy Angst, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, not necessarily stated but it’s heavily implied that five is dealing with ptsd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25827259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fiveyaaas/pseuds/fiveyaaas
Summary: Five had dreamed of being with her for as long as he could remember, and he could easily have it now if he just asked. He wouldn’t ask, though.Five had experienced a lifetime in two months, and Vanya had only experienced a month longer than him. She had fallen in love twice in that time.
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy/Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 8
Kudos: 91





	(Please Don’t) Hesitate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ImperfectStorm](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImperfectStorm/gifts).



> So someone on discord gave me the idea of a fic where Five hesitated to be with Vanya because of her tendency to fall quickly into relationships (or at least twice it has happened with Vanya). This is just... completely angst lmao.

Five could pull a trigger to end someone’s life without a second thought, but every experience he had with Vanya, he second guessed it. 

Vanya’s eyes watched him frequently once he got into the adult body, and he wondered whether or not she would ever say what she was thinking out loud. He was not stupid; he  _ knew _ . Her recovering her memories would’ve recovered all of the thoughts she had never been able to say because he was surviving in some way or the other- trying to stop the apocalypse, working for an organization to get back home, or surviving the first apocalypse she had caused. They hadn’t ever had a time that they could have addressed something that could have been, and now that they had too much time, he avoided addressing it.

Five had dreamed of being with her for as long as he could remember, and he could easily have it now if he just asked. He wouldn’t ask, though. 

Five had experienced a lifetime in two months, and Vanya had only experienced a month longer than him. She had fallen in love twice in that time. 

He knew Leonard was a result of manipulation. Her feelings for Sissy actually could have been something meaningful, but they were from different times, had different priorities, and their feelings were a result of mutual desperation. 

Not that Vanya and him weren’t pulled together from desperation. He should want to comfort her, want to help reassure her that it would be okay. Five knew she would never get back to Sissy, and he wished desperately that he felt upset about it for her. 

He could kill someone in seconds, but the death he had given himself for decades was the slowest torture he had ever given anyone. He thought that was well-deserved. 

Vanya shouldn’t want him. He was aware that she was better than him, that even if she had a body count reaching billions, she would feel remorse for every death she ever caused. Five couldn’t keep track of his own death count, didn’t have helpful things like the census to give a good estimate like she did. Five had been the Commission’s weapon, and he wished that he had hesitated now. 

He was finished with that life. He would never kill another person for as long as he could. 

When Vanya rested her head on his shoulder or asked him to sleep next to her so the nightmares away, was he then committing just a very prolonged, drawn-out murder? Was him promising her that he would stay to soak in the feeling of her eyes filling with hope actually torture to both of them? Was letting her love him wrong when he was pretty certain Vanya could fall in love with anything? 

“Please stay,” she would whisper. He would agree, just to see her smile. Wasn’t a gun without ammo pointed between someone’s eyes still a weapon nonetheless?

“Sleep next to me,” she would say, dragging him to her bed. In her bedroom, everything smelled like her, smelled like the lifetime he could have had if it wasn’t for his own arrogance. He could  _ still _ have this life, but now he wouldn’t take it because he just had to choose then to be a better person.

“Kiss me,” she would plead. This he would not give her. His lips were poisoned and he could not let her touch them, lest she tasted that poison and thought it water and she a parched beggar. 

She would turn her head away in shame, and he would let his own shame soak through his body. 

He could kill in a fraction of a second, had done it before, but he would make himself suffer for ruining the life he could have had with her. He would take revenge on himself, be his own vigilante because she picked up the broken pieces of her soul each time he crushed them and arranged them into a mosaic that boldly said, “I forgive you and love you anyways.”

He had broken her enough that she thought what she felt was somehow love. Him leaving had made her associate distance with affection, silence with softness. If absence really did make the heart grow fonder, she must love him to a fucking impossible degree. 

He couldn’t hesitate for anything else in his life, but Vanya  _ was _ always the exception, then, wasn’t she? Vanya always broke the rules and boundaries he kept in place, writing love letters and sending them through the cracks in the walls he built. 

She wanted him. She wasn’t a moth to the flame, she was Icarus to the sun. He would burn her, and she would keep reaching for him. 

It was a slow death he was giving the two of them, a death wrapped in promises, comfort, and kindness, but a death nonetheless. He had become only a killer to this world, and she had become only a victim. He hoped he would end himself before he ever ended her, but he was nothing except the blood on his hands. And when he touched her, even if the blood had long ago dried and been washed off, he still saw it touch her skin and recoiled. So he didn’t touch her very long. 

“Please don’t go,” she would tell him when he would start to move away. 

“I have to, Vanya,” he would tell her, seeing the bodies that he could now feel remorse for flashing across his closed eyes. 

She would scoot forward, study his eyes. She would touch his arm, the one branded by the first crack in his chances of ever being good. She would touch the umbrella-shaped-branding reverently, and he would remember how she had drawn on her own half-hazardly. Vanya had always wanted to be broken, maybe it wasn’t he who had done that to her. 

He certainly hadn’t helped her decline, though, hadn’t he? 

“I love you,” she would murmur. 

Did she even know what that meant?

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Sorry it was sad!!


End file.
